Quotes About Leadership

you should be," she said. "Look what happened to Julius Caesar when he underestimated those around him." So we went out to the

Sometimes I heed the Spirit's desire, and sometimes I don't. Spiritual maturity is not getting to the point where you no longer experience this tension. Rather, maturity is becoming more sensitive to it and choosing more consistently to trust the leadership and empowering of God's Spirit—by stepping out in the midst of fear, aversion, and inadequacy to serve.

Good politicians need not be intellectuals, but they should have intellectual lives.

Do not be sidetracked. A good referee will have many ways to distract an expedition, many things to draw attention, but ignore them if at all possible.

A good strategy with a bad implementation is a bad strategy

Near the end of his tenure as co-CEO of SAP, Jim Hagemann Snabe discovered that the German software giant had amassed more than fifty thousand key performance indicators (KPIs), covering every job across the company. Snabe was horrified. "We were trying to run the company by remote control," he recalls. "We had all this amazing talent, but had asked them to put their brains on ice.

Put simply, hyper-rational executives produce hyper-boring products.

In a survey we conducted for Harvard Business Review, 63 percent of respondents listed the reluctance of leaders to surrender power as a significant barrier to reducing bureaucracy.

Yet "change management," like "Scottish cuisine" and "man bun," is an oxymoron.

With every crisis, authority moves to the center, and stays there. And as bureaucracy grows stronger, those who might resist it grow weaker.

Given these dynamics, companies that fall behind tend to stay there.

Initiative, creativity, and valor can't be commanded.

There's no secret about what drives engagement. From Douglas McGregor's The Human Side of Enterprise to Dan Pink's Drive, the formula hasn't changed in sixty years: purpose, autonomy, collegiality, and the opportunity to grow.

The engagement deficit isn't about what people do at work, but how they're managed. In Gallup's research, 70 percent of the variation in engagement scores was explained by differences in the attitudes and behaviors of the employee's boss.

There's no secret about what drives engagement. From Douglas McGregor's The Human Side of Enterprise to Dan Pink's Drive, the formula hasn't changed in sixty years: purpose, autonomy, collegiality, and the opportunity to grow. Unfortunately, engagement levels haven't changed much either. It seems that every generation rediscovers the essential elements of human engagement and then does nothing.

The engagement deficit isn't about what people do at work, but how they're managed. In Gallup's research, 70 percent of the variation in engagement scores was explained by differences in the attitudes and behaviors of the employee's boss.11 For example, employees who felt they could approach their boss with any type of question were more engaged than those who couldn't.

The fault lies not with any particular manager, but with a management regime that empowers the few at the expense of the many, that prizes conformance over originality, that wedges human beings into narrow roles, robs them of agency, and treats them as mere resources.

You were put on this earth to do something significant, heroic even, and what could be more heroic than creating, at long last, organizations that are fully human?

Bringing the ATLAS detector to life required tons of leadership and creativity. What it didn't require was a pyramid. No one within the ATLAS consortium had the power to give an order. Everyone was a colleague and no one was a boss. Despite this, the ATLAS detector was completed on time and within budget.

In a formal hierarchy, the power to initiate change tends to be concentrated at the top. Major pivots require a top-level sign-off. The problem is, by the time an issue is big enough to capture the CEO's scarce attention, the organization is already playing catch-up. Leaders are insulated—organizationally, culturally, and geographically—from the fringes where new trends take shape.

Henry Ford once wondered querulously, "Why is it that whenever I ask for a pair of hands, a brain comes attached?

While veteran leaders may have the benefit of experience, they're weighed down by legacy beliefs. Many of their assumptions about customers, technology, and the competitive environment were forged years or decades earlier, and reflect a world that no longer exists.

the single greatest threat to organizational resilience: the unwillingness or inability of senior leaders to write off their own depreciating intellectual capital. This failing would be less dangerous if subordinates felt empowered to challenge C-suite dogma, but most middle managers are disinclined to bite the hand that feeds them. Thus myopia, like authority, trickles down.

In the age of upheaval, the quantities of foresight and ingenuity required to run a large organization exceed the abilities of any single human being or small team—and the bar keeps going up. Simply put, bureaucratic structures ask more of leaders than they can deliver.